Text with video:Megan Fox is considered a smoking hot actress. In Transformers II, Revenge of the Fallen, this clip shows Megan Fox torturing a human-like robot. Is torture being soft sold to children? Is official kidnapping, rendition, being sold too? Is Hollywood selling war as a neat package? Is the US Military merely an extension of offshore corporations and bankster agendas? Why are there [1700 black budget, secret police/military bases inside the US]? Is the entire US taxpayer money for this worldwide abuse?

President Obama is going on a national bus tour and says his priority is focusing on jobs. The latest polls show Obama's approval rating has hit all time lows. Will he be able to revive the US economy and claim another term as president? According to some the damage to economy has already been done and they blame the downfall on the economic elite. David DeGraw, journalist and author, speaks to Lauren on the topic.

Recent events show why election theft deserves much more scrutiny than it receives from either government officials or news reporters.

Most dramatically, a federal judge has released the 2008 testimony of GOP IT guru Michael Connell, above. The Ohio resident died in a mysterious plane crash that year after anonymous warnings he would be killed if he testified about his work with Karl Rove and others helping the Bush-Cheney ticket win in 2000 and 2004.

Other recent news includes claims by both major parties of irregularities in last week's Wisconsin state senate recall elections. In a pattern familiar nationally, Democrats suspect vote hiding by a partisan GOP elections supervisor and Republicans allege illegal inducements by Democrats to encourage voting. Elsewhere, Fox News played up a report about how a county judge in Nevada called the community-organizing group ACORN "reprehensible" on Aug. 10 and ordered a $5,000 fine for the defunct group because it paid a bonus to workers who registered voters.

To cut through the confusion on such disputes, the Justice Integrity Project I lead created a research guide with excerpts and hot links to dozens of important recent articles, books and films by election fraud researchers with diverse views. But it is weighted to materials provided by status quo critics because they face the burden of challenging authority and are typically ignored by corporate-controlled media. Our guide includes also commentaries by Fox News, and polemicists Andrew Breitbart and John Fund. They have been leaders in fostering unwarranted public fears that election fraud largely involves ineligible, poor and largely Democratic voters who may distort results.

Instead, the evidence shows that electronic voting fraud, voter suppression and similar dirty tricks by public officials pose a serious threat to the democratic process.

Yet this research is difficult for reporters and activists alike because officials control the information. Also, research into official wrongdoing tends to be sporadic, under-funded and so controversial as to be career-threatening for researchers. Major news organizations are reluctant to report even allegations of official fraud and other wrongdoing, especially in the most important elections. So, reporters and other researchers need courage and skill, as well as management support.

Statistics professor Steven Freeman and In These Times editor Joel Bleifuss devote an entire chapter to journalistic cover-up in their book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? The book argues that exit polls and other clues prove massive election fraud that flipped the election -- and that leading news organizations not only downplayed the evidence but suppressed much of it outright or misreported results.

The paperback edition of New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller's book, Fooled Again, contains a 100-page Afterword summarizing how the mainstream media avoids the issue.

One prominent national reporter assigned to such matters privately explained to me recently the thinking of his editors: They want rock-solid proof of conspiracy before even mentioning claims of misconduct for fear of ruining public confidence in the campaign and elections process. Yet by that standard, readers would learn little about any public issue. The Washington Post's 1970s Watergate investigation, for example, was a series of reports that incrementally moved the story forward.

Ohio's 2004 Election The big case in the field of electronic elections fraud involves Ohio returns in the 2004 Presidential race between incumbent Republican George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrat. Joan Brunwasser recently published on OpEd News an illuminating interview on recent developments. But this is a story that deserves revisiting at least as much as the MSM's daily and largely inconsequential updates on the horse race between 2012 contenders.

Connell's testimony on Nov. 3, 2008 was a pre-trial deposition in a suit by Ohio voters alleging an election fraud conspiracy led by Republicans running the state government and the election.

Defendants in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case include then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, below, Rove and other officials and contractors. Defendants deny impropriety in the Ohio voting, where Bush's reported margin was 118,775 votes. This enabled him to win the state's 20 electoral votes and the presidency by an electoral vote of 286 to 251.

Connell described a mind-boggling electronic system whereby Blackwell -- who counted the votes as Secretary of State but also chaired the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign -- hired Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. GovTech then linked Ohio's 2004 Presidential election returns on Election Day to the computers of the partisan GOP contractor called SmarTech in Tennessee. Connell denied any wrongdoing.

But Bob Fitrakis and Clifford Arnebeck, two of the most prominent attorneys for the plaintiffs, held a press conference in July 2008, three months before their deposition, to say that supporters of the suit had received multiple anonymous warnings that Connell would be killed if he proceeded with his deposition. They released a letter to then-Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey, other authorities and the news media asking for protection for Connell.

The attorneys later said Connell's testimony on Nov. 3, 2008 turned out to be so valuable that he would be their star witness at trial along with Stephen Spoonamore, another Republican IT consultant. Spoonamore is a former IT director for GOP senator and 2008 Presidential nominee John McCain.

Spoonamore has said the system Connell set up enabled massive fraud that decided the nation's 2004 Presidential election. Connell, a longtime Republican activist, was suspected also of helping enable Bush-Cheney malfeasance in Florida in 2000.

After elections created a Republican majority in Congress House Republicans awarded Connell contracts to set up the email system serving both Congress and various partisan Republican organizations. SmarTech clients included the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. Also, it ran a private system for the Bush White House that enabled its users to bypass a government-run system subject to more rigorous oversight by Congress, the courts or other watchdogs.

Connell's 2008 testimony has been the subject of much speculation in voting rights circles. An expert pilot, he died at age 45 in a single-plane crash six weeks after his testimony. His Piper Saratoga plane took off from a Maryland airfield for a trip to Ohio. A preliminary federal investigation failed to reach a conclusion for the crash but found no signs of mischief.

Excerpted below are several of the most prominent commentaries on the likelihood of foul play in his death. One is by investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, who photographed the take-off airfield in College Park to show how easy it could have been for a saboteur to have slipped into the vicinity.

Blackwell has taken a lead in denouncing accusers as sore losers. Like other defendants, he has denied wrongdoing both in court papers and in other public statements. But few reporters dare ever press for details or other comments, and Rove does not even bother mentioning the Ohio claims in his 2010 memoir, Courage and Consequence.

Cyber TrailConnell was a longtime GOP activist motivated in politics by his strong anti-abortion views. In his testimony, he described how he founded two IT consultancies to provide services to the Bush White House, where he worked closely with Rove. Connell's firms were New Media Communications, Inc. and GovTech.

In 2000 and 2004, Connell's New Media Communications helped on campaign IT strategy for the Bush-Cheney ticket and the Republican National Committee. Connell's other firm worked for a various government clients, including: the U.S. House of Representatives; the House Republican Conference; the House Intelligence Committee; the House Judiciary Committee; the House Ways & Means Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.

Connell said he used GovTech for such official government work, and New Media for his partisan, pro-GOP political work. Also, Connell described in his testimony how SmarTech handled such sensitive matters as White House emails, which are supposed to be preserved as government records. Bush officials later said key emails were inadvertently lost. This was after congressional investigators demanded the emails as part of the House Judiciary Committee 2007 investigation of the notorious Bush DOJ purge of nine prosecutors in 2006.

Several of those fired were Republicans who had resisted political pressure to bring what they regarded as unwarranted voting fraud cases against Democrats. Among them was New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Another was Todd Graves, U.S. attorney for the Kansas City-based western district of Missouri.

Iglesias discusses voting fraud extensively in his 2008 memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration. Iglesias had been appointed to his powerful regional post in the first year of the Bush presidency.

He recalls in the book how his Bush colleagues at DOJ headquarters transformed DOJ's Voting Litigation Section: While the emphasis had formerly been on safeguarding the franchise for disadvantaged citizens of every description, the new emphasis was on using federal power to expunge from the rolls those who, for whatever reason, were judged not to belong there.

Iglesias noted that Graves, another 2001 Bush appointee, was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, "a DOJ attorney who had made a name for himself by digging up convenient voter fraud cases, real or imagined." Schlozman had led the transformation of DOJ's Voting Litigation Section.

As part of the U.S. attorney purge, Schlozman replaced Graves in March 2006 to announce voting fraud indictments against ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Five days before the 2006 elections, just in time so that news reports would damage Democrats, Schlozman announced indictments against four former ACORN workers. They had earned $8 an hour to sign up voters in poor neighborhoods. The workers had been turned in by ACORN itself, and so it was an easy prosecution.

Congress cut off any federal funding for ACORN's varied community programs, in part because an embezzlement by its founder, and the organization dissolved in 2010.

The Obama administration's view has been, for the most part, to avoid finger-pointing. Our Project has gone further and called the DOJ's final report last summer on the U.S. attorney firing a whitewash.

We reported that the investigator was herself compromised by a court-finding of misconduct, and that she focused almost exclusively on the Iglesias firing. She failed to call key witnesses involving the other 92 U.S. attorneys offices, such as Schlozman, who approached with their job of identifying crime targets with a partisan, "loyal Bushies" outlook.

The Obama response of closing ranks with Bush predecessors thus illustrates the president's "look forward not backward" policy he announced in January 2009 regarding suspected Bush administration wrongdoing.

Also, Republicans and their media outlets have muddied the waters on election fraud issues by criticizing the DOJ for not taking stronger actions against two Philadelphia members of the New Black Panther Party (a Nation of Islam offshoot), one of whom is alleged to have menaced voters by carrying a police-type billy club outside a polling site in 2008.

Looking Ahead

Readers here can judge how that situation compares with the fears of the Republican IT consultant Spoonamore regarding the 2000 and 2004 elections. and the prospects that the same kind of problems still exist, with scant scrutiny by the news media.

Fitrakis, the plaintiffs co-counsel, summarized in an article July 20 for the Free Press advocacy news site he edits Spoonamore's testimony and significant new evidence. That evidence included the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell and Connell's company, plus a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election-night server layout system.

In response to a question of whether SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

"Until now," Fitrakis wrote, "the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud."

In a previous affidavit to the court, Spoonamore swore: "The architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

Craig Unger is the author of the 2004 best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud that provided core research for Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, the world's top-grossing documentary of all-time. Unger has been working for months on an investigative article about SmarTech and the 2004 election for Vanity Fair.

But major publications do not always publish assignments, even by successful authors. Defenders of the status quo made a major and almost-successful effort, for example, to suppress Fahrenheit.

Stay tuned as coverage of 2012 elections heats up.

This is a shortened version of a column cross-posted at the www.justice-integrity.org site along with a reference guide containing summaries and hot links to dozens of recent articles, books and films about election fraud, especially in presidential elections.

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My comment to above article:

Government, Police, Judges more dishonest than honest

Supreme Court justices appointed George W. Bush to US President, he wasn't elected. I, personally, believe that Bush's people fixed the election in 2000 and 2004. That is why I accompanied Vincent Bugliosi, the Charles Manson prosecutor, to serve the Vermont Attorney General with why Bush should be prosecuted for murder in Vermont.

Have talked with military veterans and their families. Planes no longer shoot out flares to confuse missiles. They may, as an absolute last resort, but military planes have pods that send electronic interference to the missile. It is a smaller version than is on military/CIA satellites that are part of the Ronald Reagan Star Wars program. The weakest link in an aircraft is the pilot. In a downward turning, or downward maneuver, the pilot's sight and hearing can be taken out with a weak neural-transmitter signal and paralysis, blacking out, or even death can be caused by certain concentrated frequencies. It is supposed to be classified that so many Iraqi, Libyan, and other military jets have not been taken out by missiles over the years, but have been by a pod-like device under US aircraft emitting concentrated microwave, radio, or other type radiation to take out the pilot, not the aircraft initially. Since the mid 1980's pilots allegedly have been able to smoke a jack rabbit on a runway at about a half mile away sitting in the cockpit using a joystick controlling the pod. Jack rabbits are a pile of smoking bones, no fur, right on, or beside the runway, instantly.

Maybe a similar device can be used from outside the airport on the plane, shutting the politician off to be unable to fly. No real cost, no need to breach the airfield fence. The device could appear to be just a large GPS cone as are on delivery trucks and 18 wheelers. The targeting can be done from a laptop, anywhere.